Indigenous Antif*scism

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s work has been crucial to our understanding of the subjective and objective transformations necessary not merely to respond to colonization but to destroy its conditions of possibility. Her latest book, Theory of Water, helps us better discern the links between colonization, capitalism, fascism, and the state-form. It helps us continue to find the work to be done as crises intensify and broaden. Simpson teaches that there are ways otherwise, traditions and practices that can and must be woven together—sintering like snowflakes, transforming together to become part of the snowpack—to build what she has previously called constellations of co-resistance against the fascism of the present moment.

Philosophical and political traditions that teach reform and/or revolution are insufficient to meet the task at hand. The world is on fire, and countering the fascism of the present moment requires affirming only the parts of those traditions that lead emphatically away from the archism of settler colonialism. We have come to believe that our philosophical and political practices must transform, sintering with those who have a ruthless critique of the state-form and following the maps toward futures that Simpson points at by gifting us, her readers, a theory of water. 

In Theory of Water, Simpson argues: “The deeply relational nature of our worlds means that we must fight against systems that attack and undermine the planetary network of life” (144). Simpson is clarifying, in a book about relationality, that “just because Nishnaabeg worlds are deeply relational does not mean that we should be in relationship with everyone” (144). This text deepens Simpson’s long work of critiquing states, particularly settler states, and increasingly the state-form. And here, specifically, she is critiquing how academic knowledge production captures Indigeneous knowledge for use by the state.

The book is about learning from water and begins with water in the form of “snow and ice, slush and rain” (1). As the book unfolds, Simpson theorizes with water—“Nibi” in Anishnebemowin—in many forms across many scales. Scale is central to the book. What happens at a small scale patterns what happens at a large scale; in this way, she theorizes the fractal nature of world-building. The importance of this point resonates across the text. Very small things are important: laughter, play, a snowflake falling, the shift of a cattail at the shoreline. Worlds are built at a small scale: “what we do on a small scale is how we exist at the large scale” (77).

The book begins not only with snow and ice, slush and rain, but also with boarding schools. Simpson thinks about the kids at boarding schools who learned to ski and who, in skiing, “were able to find themselves in the land, the ice, the snow, and who used this as a fugitive way to dream beyond their present moment” (4). Schools have a long history as tools of colonization, and, in this context, skiing could be flight.

Simpson’s critiques of states, the state-form, schools, and academia have long offered lines of flight, but our sense of their urgency has intensified. According to Simpson, academic practices of “extracting, translating, decoding, integrating, separating, dispossessing, textualizing, documenting, and sorting the knowledge of Indigenous peoples into a format that can be used to bolster the state’s agenda, give the impression of collaboration and disrupt Indigenous resistance, and ultimately open up our bodies of collective understanding to Freedom of Information requests” (146). As dossiers pass from the hands of university administrators into the hands of federal bureaucrats, we can see all the more clearly what Simpson describes. Indigenous scholars knew these traps of recognition before the vast majority of non-Indigenous scholars did, because resisting and refusing the trap was how they could resist genocide.

We appreciate the opportunity to participate in this blog, which occupies a blurry space within academic production. But we hear Simpson, and we are wary too. We see many with whom we share leftist commitments seeking solutions through the state. These efforts may be necessary as harm reduction. But we think Simpson is right that a reliance on the state means a scaling down of the world. We think she is right to direct us to consider something bigger, smaller, more everywhere than the state—and more relational too—water.

Theory of Water has a subtitle: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. Directing our attention to water is Simpson, directing our attention to Nishnaabeg theory. If we listen to Nishnaabeg stories, she points out, we are surrounded by maps (187). She takes the risks of writing these stories down, pointing out some of the maps, because she has learned from snow that we need sintering. We need to be changed by weaving ourselves into coalitions with others that result in our communal transformation (18), as snowflakes do when they fall from the sky and join other flakes to form snowpack. With whom we sinter matters—Simpson sinters with other Indigeneous artists, with writers, with storytellers, with elders and children. She sinters with non-human nations. She sinters with water. She sinters with Black radical thinkers and Black feminists, artists, writers, and poets. She models sintering. She gives us maps. Stories are maps. The moon on water is a map. The turtle’s back is a map.

We have been in many discussions about scale. As people who advocate abolition, we are constantly asked, “Yes, but what if not prisons?” And when we say that we must end the conditions of possibilities for prisons, we are often met with the question, “Yes, but will it scale?” But what we do in the smallest ways can make it harder to turn to cages as solutions. Simpson questions not just the question “Will it scale?” but also gives us a different way to think about scale. What if, she challenges us, the processes that we think of as “scaling up” in fact make things smaller, limit, diminish, enclose? Scaling up actually destroys relationality. Destroying relationality makes prisons more possible. Destroying relationality makes settler colonialism more possible. We are with Simpson; we think the state steals our relationality, turns that relationality against us, turns it into violence, and tells us that all we are doing is merely “scaling up solutions.”

Simpson gives us a record of her gratitude to those who have believed in Nibi, who have understood that “Nibi methodically emphasizes that we can build all the enclosures we want, including those of our own bodies, but there are world-making forces, building and maintaining the planet, that are beyond us” (33). Simpson says that her ancestors did not struggle with world-making as she does, because they understood “they weren’t really world making, they were building Nishnaabeg lifeways to fit into a much larger communal way of living and bringing forth more life, lifeways that involved every form of creation in every location on the planet. We didn’t have to invent anything. We merely had to fit in” (34).

Simpson clarifies that we don’t have to fit into everything, that not all relations are good ones. We have to discern what will make life more possible. But we don’t have to discern by ourselves. There are maps everywhere. There are communities promoting life with which we can seek to sinter. And we will be changed by this. But we don’t have to know ahead of sintering what we will build. We don’t have to have a plan to scale up, or scale down, or avoid capture by the state, or how to be legible to the funders. In retelling stories of Gzwhe Manidoo and Gizhiigokwe, Simpson notes:

“I know, too, that the experiences of Gzwhe Manidoo and Gizhiigokwe eliminate the possibility that this work will be easy and spontaneous. Their stories tell us that there was no map. There was no research plan. There was no set of strategies. There was no land. There was no leader—or there were many leaders. There was, however, a practice of love and hope. There was a fostering of emergence. There was a collaborative practice of kindness. There was persistence and perhaps the belief that eventually, working together, these beings would generate what they collectively needed to get to the next day. They understood that in remaking the world, they weren’t building an entire planetary system but merely figuring out how to live within, and contribute to, the cycles that already existed and had given them life (44–45).

As the fascist crisis intensifies and becomes more general, we think Simpson is offering us care and kindness. And this care and kindness comes from an ethics that “view[s] private property, prisons, punishment and greed as terrible mistakes” (44). We have long thought these were terrible mistakes. We would like to sinter with those who also know they are terrible mistakes. We feel hurt by and tired of all the conversations where we couldn’t get to the agreement that these were terrible mistakes, where we were asked what the plan is as a way of saying we must keep caging people, where the commitments seem to be to the state, some state, any state, please, please, please let there be an arche.

Simpson shares with us through her text (and we think her other works—the albums, the poems, the YouTube videos) a tradition that did not make states, that has survived state-making. Simpson connects her work with anarchism and sees it as an appropriate response to fascism. We come from traditions that made states. We have conscious and unconscious attachments to the state-form. We want a plan. We want to know what we will build instead of the cages. The care that we receive from Simpson’s book is the care of traditions that do not make states, that have survived the making of states. Not untouched or unaffected, but like Nibi, persistently.

Fascism directs care, distributes it—calculatively, economically, through reform—provides it to some at the expense of others, and often calls sacrifice and sacrifices noble, necessary, and natural. Fascism often calls abandonment care. And to be fair, it often vilifies care as a glitch that we can program out. Fascism needs the state-form. The state that claims to scale up our actions, but in reality often (if not always) scales them down by containing and trapping them into the state’s modality of violence and extraction. Fascists seem to understand these powers of the state-form better than most. Fascism insists that we are safest alone and invulnerable to each other. Liberalism far too often shares this view. We are not the first to make this point, and it may feel modest or even minimal to have to be reminded yet again that we can’t fight fascism with liberalism. But we also see that there are theoretical traditions, targeted for exploitation and destruction by states, that have understood the development of states and fascism as integral to colonial expansion.

We are tired. We are hurt. And we have not borne the worst of these processes, not by a long shot. Our gratitude for Simpson writing down Nishnaabeg maps is ceaseless. As bell hooks reminds us, sometimes we come to theory because we are hurting, desperate, and in need of healing. Yet hooks also clarifies that “Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end” (2). We see that the communal transformations necessary to destroy fascism and its conditions of possibility require directing our theorizing toward revolutionary, liberatory, and healing ends. We find such direction from Simpson’s maps (187).

As Simpson theorizes water, she models as much as demonstrates how to sinter with other traditions in response to the crises we face. Sintering like snow, moving and cycling like water, telling stories of failure, experimentation, and new attempts are living practices, captured and recorded for us in text. Philosophy is a living practice. Who we sinter with and how we sinter is central to what is possible for us to think, how we relate, how we fit into the world and simultaneously build it.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.